Shortchanging Special Ed

December 21, 1992|By JIM STRATTON Daily Press

Nancy Quinn knows her son's a handful.

His learning disability makes him fidgety and prone to outbursts. When he wants to say something, he does. Even if that means yelling at mom while she's on the phone. But, she's says, he's a good kid and does well in school - if he's got a strong teacher.

Five years ago, Quinn's son entered the fourth grade in Powhatan County. From the start, she says, he fooled around, "started to coast," and "just wasn't working."

Quinn, a mother of four who'd already guided one learning-disabled son successfully through school, marched down to the school to find out what was wrong.

What she discovered was a teacher who hadn't been formally trained to teach children with learning disabilities. The teacher had been hired, though, with full approval of the school division and State Department of Education.

"She was put in there, and quite simply couldn't handle it," Quinn says. "She didn't know what to do with him."

That teacher's lack of formal training isn't rare in Virginia's schools. For more than a decade, thousands of teachers have taught special education without meeting the state's minimum requirements.

They were given their assignments under a long-standing "waivers" program that most parents don't know about. "They don't have a clue," says one state advocate. The policy allows teachers with little or no training in special education to work with children who experts say need the most specialized instruction.

"They may have been teaching English, they may have been teaching woodshop," says Philip R. Jones, the coordinator of Virginia Tech's program in special ed administration. "The schools have basically been allowed to go out and get warm bodies."

Last year, about 1,176 teachers were given waivers to teach some category of special education, according to State Department of Education figures. Of those, 361 were fully trained special ed teachers who were working outside their field of expertise - for example, a teacher trained to instruct mentally retarded children was handling students with some other disability.

The remaining 815 teachers, almost 70 percent, had no special ed endorsement - the state's stamp of approval - in any category. And just under half of those had never taken any classes required for endorsement.

For 1990-91, about 800 teachers worked on a waiver basis with more than half having no special ed endorsement. The year before that, there were about 1,000 without endorsements.

Special education is the generic term for a program that deals with a broad spectrum of disabilities or handicaps.

The conditions range from mild learning difficulties to serious mental and physical problems.

Endorsement, officials say, is important because it helps safeguard quality. It's granted only when a teacher has completed a program that drills him or her in the complexities of learning handicaps.

Those programs show teachers how to navigate the labyrinth of federal and state law surrounding special education. They learn to tell whether a child primarily learns through sight, hearing or touch. And they're taught the symptoms of the handicap and how those play out in the classroom.

As one parent put it, "they learn where the child ends and where the disability begins."

But schools have hired teachers who aren't fully trained because Virginia, like the rest of the country, has faced a special ed teacher shortage for more than a decade. Colleges turn out relatively few special ed teachers, and those who enter the field tend to burn out faster than colleagues in general education.

In Virginia, officials say, the problem is most acute in the west, southwest and south central areas - poor, rural regions that few young, well-trained teachers consider attractive.

In Hampton Roads the percentage of special ed teachers working on waivers is relatively low, about 8 percent. Statewide, the figure hovers at 18 percent.

State officials have moved to reduce the number of teachers on waivers by limiting their term to two years.

During that time, the teacher is expected to complete, or make solid progress toward, finishing the classes required for endorsement.

The state has also established a program that beams special ed training classes into sites throughout the state. By participating, teachers can be fully trained in two years.

Still, officials acknowledge the existing shortage will probably continue and that leaves them few choices: find teachers to plug the holes or ship students to other school systems.

"It's terrible," said Joal Smith Read of the Education Department's special ed division. "But what do you want the special ed directors to do? They're desperate."